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As I was transcribing a recipe manuscript by Elizabeth Bulckley, “A Booke of Hearbes and Receipts,” (compiled in 1627, Wellcome Library) I came across a page title “The Vertues of Rosemary.” While apparently Rosemary can perform many medical miracles, what really piqued my interest was a brief sentence at the bottom of the page (12r):

Also rosemarie comforteth the braine

the memory, the inward senses, & restoreth

speech to them that are posessed with adumbe

paulsie, espetially the conserue made of this.

What did this mean, a conserve of this? A conserve of rosemary, certainly. But made out of what? A conserve, distinctly form other forms of preserving food, usually contains pieces of fruit (presumably because many fruits, especially their rinds or skins, contain pectin, which works as a congealing agent when it is prepared), and rosemary is certainly not a fruit.

The idea of a rosemary conserve brings something into question that I find very interesting about early modern recipes. Recipes are generally written in the imperative, but in the case of early modern recipes, many recipes direct the reader to perform tasks that have an implied understanding such as: still, make it up, candy it. These directions point toward an understanding within cooking culture at the time that was taken for granted. Unlike modern recipes that direct the user to use certain temperatures when cooking in the oven, early modern recipes might suggest an oven that is quick, slow, or covered. At other times, heat directions find common ground, such as place on a slow fire (in modern terms, low to medium heat). Measurement directions work on the same principal. A recipe might direct the user to add a quantity of product according to a handful or spoonful. We still use a similar application in modern recipes, but at other times a recipe might direct the user to add a “quantity.” Recipes, then as much as today, fall in that valley between exact science and intuition (baking is usually the exception).

So, some boundaries in cooking are porous, either by default or understanding. There are some cooking practices on the other hand that are strictly differentiated, like that of conserves, preserves, waters, and syrups. This makes sense given the times. Lacking convenient modern preservation methods, early modern cooking required many differing forms of preserving foods. Having differing methods for preserving foods based on strict methods worked for both varying an otherwise limited degree of flavor profiles, as well as allowing similar cultural groups to share recipes and cooking methods with a knowledge of what the preparation and outcome of that recipe was supposed to be (see: implied understandings).

This difference between the strict and porous boundary is exactly why I became curious about a rosemary conserve. So I decided to make it, and some variations too. For the rosemary conserve, I made a rosemary water that reduced by about half (it was very pungent), and then made a syrup out of some of that water by adding sugar in a 1-to-1 ratio and then let it reduce by about a third. The result had the consistency of honey, but with a rich rosemary aroma and flavor (the needles were strained before adding the sugar). I also made a conserve out of grapefruit and cranberries (it’s about that time of year) that was based on two recipes for making a conserve of barberries (a mid-17th century recipe from Nicholas Webster and an anonymous early 18th century recipe, both from the Folger Library) and a conserve of strawberries and lemon rind. To both I added the rosemary water instead of plain water in order to give it flavor. These jellied much better, certainly due to the addition of pectin from the citrus fruits. But I still cannot figure out why Bulckley would assume that a rosemary conserve, without giving its recipe, is not a strange thing – that by mentioning it, the reader would know not only what it is, but how to create it. A thorough search of the Folger and Wellcome of a rosemary conserve were fruitless (please let me know if you find something otherwise!).

You might be thinking that it would be easy to simply add powdered pectin to a rosemary solution similar to what I concocted, but powdered pectin wasn’t isolated (much less distributed) until the mid-19th century. I’m still not sure what Bulckley meant, but (see video below) I was more than happy to explore the idea in my own kitchen.

Samuel Fatzinger is a former restaurant cook and current MA candidate, University of Texas, Arlington

For this Thanksgiving, why not try cooking from a seventeenth-century recipe?

EMROC is hosting a transcribe, cook, and post of FB party as its “Thankful Thanksgiving,” and we invite you to join us.

We would like you to transcribe a recipe from the mid-17th-century cookbook, “Mrs Fanshawes Booke of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery”(MS7113), which is housed at the Wellcome Library and available digitally.[1] You might want to try this recipe, “To Stew Oysters,” which bakes the oysters in their own “liquour” and flavors them with nutmeg, onion, and pepper (Dromio page 102), or maybe “To Frye Hartichokes,” that is, artichokes that are fried in butter and dressed with parsley (Dromio page 101).

Or perhaps you would like to bring a new-old dessert drink to the family table: a “Whipt Sillibub” a frothy spiked drink (Dromio page 91), or a “Gooseberry Foole,” made of gooseberries, wine, and eggs (Dromio page 183).

You probably wouldn’t trust your turkey to an early modern recipe, but you might be interested to know that it was a very popular dish in England. As early as the 1520s, turkeys made their appearance in England, coming from the new world via seafarers and explorers. By 1555, the London market had a legally fixed price for turkeys, and English farmers began raising them for market by the 1570s.[2] In the early seventeenth-century, the turkey shows up on the weekly menus of large estates, such as Penshurst (which was the poet Philip Sidney’s childhood home).[3] By mid-century, large numbers of large numbers of turkeys were brought into London from the countryside for sale, and they were common fixtures on Christmas tables. Ann Fanshawe’s table included turkey, as she lists it as a meat that is best roasted, but unfortunately she did not leave a recipe for it. However, in Constance Hall’s cookbook from the 1670s is the recipe, “To Season a Turkey Pye,” and an anonymous recipe book from 1720 (Folger W.b. 653) contains three recipes for Turkey.[4]

So are you ready to choose your recipe and transcribe?

Here are a few that you might want to try:

To Make Cheesecakes (Dromio page 128)

To make Lemon Cakes (Dromio page 128

To make Spanish Creame (Dromio page 99)

To make Rice Pan Cakes (Dromio page 98)

Mrs Gadfords Cake (a cake with currants) (Dromio page 93)

To bake a Hare (if you are adventurous) (Dromio page 99)

To make Jumballs–these are a kind of cookie (Dromio pages 291-292)

Have fun and now here are the nuts and bolts to help you with the project:

TOOLS:

We’ll be using the Folger’s transcription interface, at: http://transcribe.folger.edu. The interface is called Dromio and associated with Early Modern Manuscripts Online. When asked to sign in, just enter your first and last names, and an account will be created for you (please be sure enter your name as you’d like it to appear in the database). Then, click “EMROC.” Our manuscript will be listed as “MS7113” (Fanshawe’s receipt book).

While transcribing, you’ll probably also want a window open to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[2]Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England. Phases, Fads and Fashions 1500-1760 (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 254 and C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain. From the Stone Age to Recent Times (London: Constable and Company, 1973), 128-31.

[3] The Sidney family documents are housed in the Kent History and Library Centre; the menus are in De Lisle MSS U1475 A60.

As indicated by Katrina Rutz to the introduction to the Bulkeley Project, Elizabeth Bulkeley’s A boke of hearbes and receipts contains a section that tells the reader how to recognize five different sugar “heights” or boiling temperatures, a section common to many pre-nineteenth-century recipe books (Hess 225). The third height, known as manus christi height, is a bit of an enigma in the culinary history world. “Manus christi”—or “hands of Christ” in Latin—refers not only to a stage in the candy-making process, but also to an expensive medicinal hard candy that first appears in medieval recipe books and continues on until its abrupt disappearance in the early nineteenth century (Davidson 493). However, despite their shared name, manus christi the candy and manus christi the candy-making height seem to be entirely at odds with one another (493).

The vast majority of authoritative sources on pre-nineteenth-century candy-making, including The Oxford Companion to Food, refer to culinary historian Karen Hess when discussing manus christi height. In Hess’s book, Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, she states that manus christi height refers to the point at which boiling sugar has reached 215°F (Hess 227). This temperature is a little bit cooler than the stage of candy-making now known as the thread stage; sugar at this temperature is used to make syrups and is characterized by the appearance of loose, non-balling threads when the sugar solution is dropped into cold water (“The Cold Water Candy Test”). It is likely the current moniker “thread stage” that led Hess to believe that manus christi height refers to this boiling temperature: the instructions for manus christi height in Washington’s cookbook read “When your sugar is at manis Christi height, it will draw betwixt your fingers like a small thrid, and before it comes to that height, it will not draw. & soe use it as you have occasion” (Hess 226). Bulkeley’s instructions read similarly to Washington’s: “When your suger is in a full sirrup let it boile till it doth drawe betwixt your fingers like athred and then it is a manuus Chrie height” (Digital Image 169/41). These along with other books describing manus christi height almost always contain a reference to it “drawing between the fingers like a thread.”

The presence of the word “thread” in most of the instructions for manus christi height probably led scholars to believe that it is the equivalent of the thread stage in today’s candy-making terminology. This would put manus christi the height at odds with manus christi the candy: hard candy requires a much hotter temperature to form, and so Hess and other scholars have postulated that manus christi candy and manus christi height are unrelated. However, Hess might have been incorrect in her original statement, and thus this postulation might also be incorrect.

Wellcome Manuscript 169, fol. 26r

The assumption that manus christi height is the same as today’s thread stage ignores the fact that instructions for manus christi height specifically state that “it doth drawe betwixt your fingers like athred” (Digital Image 169/41, emphasis added). Sugar in today’s thread stage will not draw between your fingers. It will create threads in a bowl of cold water, but those threads will not maintain their structural integrity outside of water (“The Cold Water Candy Test”). The stage in which sugar will draw like a thread in one’s hands in today’s candy-making lexicon is the hard ball stage, which falls between 250°F and 265°F (“The Cold Water Candy Test”). In this stage, “the syrup will form thick, ‘ropy’ threads as it drips from the spoon” (“The Cold Water Candy Test”), threads which would be strong enough to maintain their integrity if drawn between the fingers.

Probably the most convincing evidence that manus christi height refers to today’s hard ball rather than today’s thread stage is its position within the sugar section. Manus christi height falls in the middle of the candy-making section, just like today’s hard-ball stage falls in the middle of current candy-making tutorials. The next step to figuring out the exact temperature of manus christi height is to further explore the other stages of candy-making. If we can find recipes that refer to specific heights in the candy-making process, we will get a better idea of what these heights looked like, and consequently we will be able to more accurately correlate them with our own current candy-making stages.

Hopkins, Kate. Sweet Tooth: The Bittersweet History of Candy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012. Print.

____________________________

Monterey Hall is a student at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. She worked with the Bulkeley manuscript during a course on Digital Research Methods in Historical Recipes with Professor Rebecca Laroche.

While contemporary discussion of “health” revolves around one’s dietary and physical habits, recipe-writers of the 16th and 17th centuries held a much more serious understanding of health and its preservation. To be “healthy” was not a physical matter, but a spiritual one: to have “health” often meant aligning oneself with God and abdicating sin. The word “health” was also used analogously with a Christianized notion of salvation, which stipulates that belief in Jesus Christ’s divinity and message yields entry into heaven. This analysis explores how receipt-writers discussed the concept of health, which will provide a better sense of what the authors originally meant to convey when they wrote about sustaining one’s health during this time period. Maintaining health was exceedingly more important to these writers than our current standards of preserving health – doing so was a matter not just of wellness or sickness, but of salvation or damnation of the soul itself.

Although health is currently understood as “Soundness of body; that condition in which its functions are duly and efficiently discharged,” (“health, n.1”) the meaning of health for writers of the 16th and 17th centuries referred more to “Spiritual, moral, or mental soundness or well-being; salvation” (“health, n.4”). Here, the OED demonstrates that our modern understanding of health is that which is constricted to the body, to the “soundness” of the body; but the archaic definition of the word illustrates a transcendence of the corporeal to the spiritual, in such a high degree that having “health” means having salvation – a spiritual, Christian sense of salvation. One example of the importance of health in this context derives from Anne Wheathill’s A Handful of Wholesome (Though Homely) Herbs, in which she prays that “Wherefore in thée my hart shall be joifull, and in thy saving health, which is thy sonne Christ our Saviour and redéemer” (Wheathill sig. B5r). The phrase “saving health” occurs three times in this text, while the word “salvation” or words referring to God often appear alongside the word “health.” This treatment of “health” indicates a heavily spiritual connotation drawn from the word. In this passage, “thy saving health” is equated directly to Christ and his status as savior.

Wellcome MS 169, fol. 23r, Digital Image 38.

Health not only constitutes salvation, though, but also represents a spiritual notion that one must strive for, to retain a connection with God. In her A Booke of Hearbes and Receipts, Elizabeth Bulkeley includes a recipe titled “A Speciall meanes to preserve health.” This recipe provides metaphorical directions that exemplify how one can develop a better connection with God. In the format of a recipe, the text instructs readers to undergo a variety of spiritual experiences to become more Christ-like, so that they can:

Preserving health, here, illustrates an end goal of acquiring salvation and entry into heaven. Throughout this recipe, readers are called to commit themselves to various acts of worship in order to relinquish worldly desire and vice for the end goal of attaining redemption. These acts are represented as if they were ingredients in a recipe, with materials such as a “quart of Repentance of Ninyvie” or a “spoon of faithfull prayers,” and the recipe not only confirms a spiritual understanding of the word “health,” but also serves as a creative way of instilling guidance for those who want to preserve their spiritual salvation (MS 169/38).

It is also important to contextualize this analysis with the fact that many recipes of this time, including recipes in Bulkeley’s manuscript, were meant to stave off the plague. Due to a limited understanding of the plague at the time, people were often led to believe that this disease was the result of God exacting punishment upon sinners of the world. In having this belief, the relationship between one’s moral purity and one’s physical health becomes much clearer and more intimately intertwined. By preserving one’s moral sanctity, one would be alleviated from a divinely inspired punishment against humanity and would thus be able to survive during the plague. By indulging in sin, though, one risked being struck down with the life-threatening Black Death.

While these texts provide compelling evidence for the spiritual connotation derived from the word “health,” the word was still fairly versatile and retained its current definition in other usage. In her analysis of Caterina Sforza’s Experimenti, Meredith Ray points out that “[a]t the turn of the sixteenth century, Caterina recorded over four hundred recipes for beauty and health,” and further discusses how Sforza’s manuscript focuses on the physicality of beauty and health (Ray). Thus, health retained its current definition in other usage during this time, while the largely spiritual dimension of the word has greatly dissipated as the centuries have progressed. Despite the evolved nature of this word and its multifaceted use, the important takeaway is that many authors of the 16th and 17th centuries utilized the word “health” in a far different way, equating the word to salvation. Understanding the contextual cues of this word in reading literature of this time period will enable individuals to better distinguish if the text is discussing matters of the body, of the soul, or both.

Jonathan Powers just received his B.A. in English from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He worked with Professor Rebecca Laroche in a course on Digital Research Methods in Historical Recipes.

In my previous post, I discussed Mistress Vernam and her contribution to Lady Frances Catchmay’s Booke of Medicins (https://f-origin.hypotheses.org/879). I had run across a single possible match for Mistress Vernam in the genealogical database Ancestry.com: the search pointed to Jess Cox, a woman who was married to John Vernam in Hardwicke, Gloucestershire in 1613 (Ancestry.com). Despite this find, however, I was hardly closer to discovering her connection to either Lady Catchmay or seventeenth-century medical practice.

I used the result from Ancestry.com to try and locate Mistress Vernam in other contemporaneous medical books. Unfortunately, her lack of genealogical records makes Jess Vernam’s possible medical connections difficult to pinpoint. There are quite a few references to various doctors named “Cox” in several early modern databases; but without a record of Jess’s birth, there is no way to know if these doctors were related to her. Rather than continuing to search for Mistress Vernam by her name, I decided to look for her through her recipes.

At the present moment, searching for recipes across texts is a messy and imperfect process due in part to the fact that we as a scholarly community are still in the earlier stages of transcribing and coding these early modern books. As this process comes closer to completion, it will be much easier to search through them in a thorough and efficient manner. What the Wellcome Library has transcribed into their database thus far, however, is absolutely invaluable: I was able to look for Mistress Vernam’s recipes via their titles by breaking each title into its keywords and searching for their variant spellings.

My search revealed a link between the penultimate recipe within Mistress Vernam’s medicines and a recipe in MS 373. Mistress Vernam’s “A medicine to Clarifye the Eyesighte” instructs to “Take the gaules of swine, of an eele, & of a cocke, temper them well together with honney & fayre water & keape it in a cleane glasse, for your vsse: when you haue neade annoynte the eyes therwith” (MS184a/34)

MS 373 belonged to and was written by Jane Jackson in 1642 (MS 373), meaning that it was compiled almost twenty years after Lady Catchmay’s Booke of Medicins. Unfortunately Jackson does not give any attribution for this recipe, nor does the book contain any of Mistress Vernam’s other medicines. Still, this find suggests one possible connection between Mistress Vernam and the wider medical community. With this new insight, the next step would be to find out who Jane Jackson was and whether or not she was connected to Lady Catchmay and Mistress Vernam. And if she was not, then what might Jackson and Vernam’s common source have been?

This line of inquiry is outside the scope of this post, although it is certainly one that should be pursued at some point in the future. For now, I will leave you with this: it is likely that I missed several matches for Mistress Vernam’s recipes and thus I likely also missed several connections. Although I only found two iterations of the above recipe in my own searches, it is quite possible that versions of “A medicine to Clarifye the Eyesighte” appear in other manuscripts beyond the two mentioned here. I encourage my fellow scholars to look for this recipe elsewhere so that we can discover more connections between Mistress Vernam and the medical community.

As evidenced by the two recipes above, titles can vary between sister recipes both in terms of spelling and phrasing; it is simply not possible for a single person to account for every variation. A much more detailed method of search would look not only for titles, but also for ingredients. Searching for uncommon ingredients would help scholars to find connections between medical texts, their authors, and their contributors. This type of search will not be possible for several years yet. When it is possible, it will be a powerful tool for piecing together an accurate picture of the vast early modern medical community. Searching for recipes in addition to names will allow us to see connections and relationships within the medical community that might not have been apparent otherwise. And it will hopefully some day allow us to find out the true identity of the mysterious Mistress Vernam.

Monterey Hall, is an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and is a student of Rebecca Laroche.

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Founded in 2012, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) is an international group of scholars and enthusiasts who are committed to improving free online access to historical archives and quality contextual information.